Lewis Black arrives at Brooklyn Winery a little after two P.M. on a Tuesday. I introduce myself and explain that we’ll taste a flight of some of the urban winery’s best products, get his thoughts on each, and perhaps learn a thing or two about him in the process. “Yeah, you’ll learn that it’s too early for me to be drinking,” he mutters as he removes his coat. “And that spitting thing is bullshit.”

The Grammy Award–winning comedian, New York Times best-selling author, and Daily Show contributor has one résumé credit few are aware of: amateur wine connoisseur.

“I drank cheap [wine] in college, and then I went to Scotch,” explains Black of the first steps of his journey. “By the time Scotch took off, I was done with it. ‘Oh really, the Glenmorangie that was $12 a bottle is now $50? Fuck you.’”

Disillusioned with the brown stuff, Black found wine again when his brother—who had lived in France for five years—started buying French wine by the case. “He bought a quarter barrel of this Bordeaux from Saint-Émilion. And to us, it was like, ‘What, are you fucking kidding me?’ Literally, like a hundred bottles came to his apartment in New York.”

But Black was soon hooked, eventually going so far as to rent property at Château Valandraud in Saint-Émilion and inviting guests to visit and drink with him. “My friends are separated along the lines of being relaxed and uptight. . . . The ones who didn’t give me shit were great, and then the other assholes, I’d point to a car and go, ‘There’s the car. Fuckin’ do whatever you want.’”

So here we are at Brooklyn Winery, where Black is looking forward to a tasting flight, having recently enjoyed a glass of the winery’s Cabernet Sauvignon during a Nets game at the Barclay Center. Following a brief tour led by winemaker Conor McCormack, Black and his longtime friend Steve Olsen—owner of New York City’s West Bank Café and another of Black’s wine-loving influences—sit down to sample some of the stellar beverages McCormack proudly makes in Williamsburg, New York.

I. BRIGHT AND ACIDIC

McCormack starts by pouring a 2014 Un-oaked Chardonnay. Made from grapes grown in the Finger Lakes, the wine is fermented and aged for about eight months in stainless steel tanks. McCormack explains that its green apple-like qualities are due to the fact that he doesn’t allow for secondary (malolactic) fermentation, which keeps the wine “bright and acidic.”

“Smells like green apples,” Black observes, and we all agree. “Yeah, well, that was tough—he said it,” he admits, pointing to McCormack. “You could have said it smells like bunions, and I’d go [sniffs wine], ‘Bunions!’”

Black has not always been one for white wines, but has, over the years, found a few that work for him. “I was drinking New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs because they’re citrusy,” he recalls of his early days of wine discovery. “I liked that because it made me feel like it was a health drink: ‘This tastes like oranges and grapefruits—a good way to start the day!’”

II. THE SCARY POINT

Next is a 2013 Barrel Fermented Chardonnay, also from the Finger Lakes, but fermented in used French barrels to slowly expose the wine to oxygen.

“This gets to my scary point,” Black reveals, as the wine—which he ultimately enjoys very much —is almost too oaky for his taste.

“What else gets you to your scary point?” I ask him.

“When I go, Really? I drank two bottles by myself?!”

III. WORKING ON IT

“This I couldn’t do,” says Black of Brooklyn’s Skin Fermented Chardonnay, a white wine naturally fermented on its skins with wild yeast. The orangish wine is tart—bordering on funky—and even McCormack admits that the wine polarizes customers.

“Keep working on it,” Black says to McCormack before letting out a wheezy chuckle.

Black worked on honing his own style for decades, having not gone full-time as a professional comic until he was well over 40 years old. But things did move fairly quickly once he began touring in the early 90s: “You take what I’m doing now, and double the energy and double the yelling—who was gonna fucking follow that?” he contends. “About six months into it, they just started headlining me.”

IV. UNFILTERED

The 2012 Pinot Noir spends only 10 months in barrel for a very straightforward, earthy wine that drinks somewhat like Burgundy. A touch rough around the edges, it is also unfined and unfiltered.
“I think it’s fuckable,” Black declares. The first time he discovered food or drink could possess such a quality was in 1980, when his brother bought him a special dessert in France. “It was this chocolate fuck concoction. I had been literally starving; I was broke . . . and I said to my brother, ‘This is food when it’s the best it can be. You can actually fuck the food and then eat it.’”
Black’s financial struggles at the time were thanks to a career in playwriting—primarily as playwright in residence for Steve Olsen’s West Bank Café throughout the 1980s. “During his tenure there, we produced and presented 896 American one act plays, several of which were his,” Olsen recalls. “Lew opened every show as the house M.C., and it was all writers and actors in the audience. . . . He’d say, ‘Next month we’re doing two of my plays,’ and you’d hear, ‘Booo! booo!’ He’d say, ‘I read all your plays and mine were the best!’”

V. WORTH THE WAIT

According to McCormack, the grapes used in Brooklyn’s 2012 Cabernet Sauvignon “take forever to ferment.” And with an extended maceration, and two years of aging in French oak barrels, the wine requires an especially long time to develop.

Black relishes this beverage—the same one he fell in love with at the Barclays Center—remarking, “And I don’t have to watch the Nets!”

Like the wine, produced from Sonoma grapes by skillful hands in Brooklyn, Black was born in one place but made in another. Though originally from Silver Spring, Maryland, he is as New York as it gets, having lived here for close to 40 years. And like McCormack, who makes wine that represents his own individual taste, Black has always stayed true to himself, both as a comedian and an opinionated wine taster. “I did exactly what I wanted to do,” he says before adding with a laugh: “Being yourself will make for a really long time before you break through.”

These days, Black could make all types of live-show demands as a nationally famous headliner. But his current performance as hospitality rider makes only one especially crucial request: a bottle of wine.